If the transition isn’t unanimous and simultaneous, it backslides into xenophobic protectionism.

Another dynamic element that receives too little attention in the degrowth literature is the international dimension of the policy agenda.42 What happens if one country decides to walk down the ecosocialism path, but others do not? In that case, commitment to degrowth leads, in an act of selfpreservation and contrary to the idyllic narrative, to an insular worldview and closure from the outside world.43

This is true, first, because the economic scale-down envisioned by ecosocialism reins in international trade. Production needs to be carried out on a smaller scale and as locally as possible to avoid environment-damaging global supply chains, so exchanges between countries will shrink. Along the same logic, international travel will need to be reduced, given the inevitable environmental repercussions of airplanes. As society moves full-throttle toward eco-autarky, we can expect less exposure to outside cultures, and possibly more xenophobia. So argues Benjamin Friedman in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, based on patterns of nationalism across US history. Indeed, this realization dates back to Enlightenment thinkers, who saw commerce as breaking through religious groups, political affiliations, and prejudices in its pursuit of economic gains. It inspired the well-known observation by 1800s economist Frédéric Bastiat that “when goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.” 44

Second, the degrowth society will become one of scarcity, however voluntary. When this happens, those who are not interested in such a project will flee. Who are these likely to be? Well, to begin with, probably the rich, along with many highly skilled and entrepreneurial individuals who see possibilities of greater rewards, self-expression, and self-fulfillment under democratic capitalism.45 But of course, the ecosocialist society cannot allow this to happen—not only because the financing of its social agenda relies on heavy redistribution, but also because migration would belie the model’s claim of superiority. This would weaken the ideological glue that is fundamental to keeping such a society together.

Once again, the Soviet Union comes to mind, and in particular the history of the Berlin Wall. After the Second World War, Berlin was divided in two, with one sector occupied by the Soviets and the other by Allied forces—but movement around the city was possible. As living standards started to diverge between the two sectors, people started voting with their feet: over three million East Germans fled to the West. For the reasons noted above, the Soviets could not allow this, and in 1961 they erected a barbedwire fence overnight, which subsequently turned into a highly guarded wall. Thus, a Communist movement that first styled itself “The International” and professed the abolition of passports transformed into a Soviet system with an effective ban on foreign travel.

There are reasons to suspect that any degrowth society would need to erect substantial barriers to the outside world to keep its system operational. Once this is realized, it is hard to imagine this appealing to its potential constituency of environmentally savvy and open-minded internationalists—in particular, the urban, cosmopolitan, and educated members of the Millennial and Gen Z generations.